U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also the U.S. national security advisor, told Greg Laurie on the evangelical pastor’s show that he draws on his Christian faith to navigate scary global developments.
“I can’t even imagine the kind of information you’re exposed to and the things that could cause great alarm and the things that could cause fear,” Laurie said in an interview on Oct. 15, which the U.S. State Department released on Tuesday.
“How do you process that?” the pastor asked.
“I think fear is an enemy. It’s a paralytic,” Rubio said. “Of all the faiths in the world, and I’m not prejudging or criticizing anybody, but of all of the faiths in the world, the ones who should never live in fear or the ones who should never live in worry that becomes paralyzing are Christians, because we know how it ends.”
“You watch a scary movie. You’ve seen it 10 times. You know how it ends. You know the lead character survives,” he added. “But, nonetheless, you still get nervous every time you see it.”
A world “free of problems and free of challenges and free of worry is not realistic,” he told the pastor. “It’s also not biblical. It’s not true to our faith.”
Rubio also talked about Jew-hatred, which he called “an ancient poison.”
“It is one of the oldest hatreds in the world,” he said. “It’s caused tremendous harm repeatedly throughout history. It’s also been the story of the Jewish people and of the challenges that we know they have faced from the very beginning, despite God’s covenant, and certainly even 70 AD, the destruction of the temple and the scattering of the people.”
Hatred is part of the “fallen human condition,” according to Rubio, but “somehow, antisemitism is a unique, enduring form of hatred that has repeated itself in every generation.” That hatred was most pronounced during the Holocaust and on Oct. 7, according to Rubio. “I think it puts us on guard in realizing it,” he said.
The U.S. secretary added that present-day antisemitism melds “this anti-, they call themselves anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, anti-Western, sentiment that latches on to key issues.”
“They latched on to the situation in Gaza as the latest example. They view Israel and, by extension, the Jewish people as a—they say it openly—as some sort of colonial, capitalist invaders that occupied a land that didn’t belong to them,” he said. “They, in many cases, make ahistoric arguments about how the Jewish people had never had an enduring presence in that land, which we know is not true.”
Rubio also told the pastor that U.S. President Donald Trump is “the right person for this time,” who exhibited “extraordinary” leadership in securing the release of the hostages from Gaza. He praised White House adviser Steve Witkoff and former adviser Jared Kushner, in particular.
“There were months where frankly I doubted whether they were ever going to see their loved ones again,” Rubio said of relatives of hostages.
Getting to see the reunions was “one of those things that I think you can serve in a place like this for a very long time, and few people get a chance to be a part of a day as historic as that.”
